Marking the Atlas
by bonestrewn
Summary: "After what you did to your parents, it's no wonder nobody wanted you. No one would take you in. No one wanted a killer. But I helped you, didn't I? Tell me, Emma." "You saved me, Regina." In the Enchanted Forest, an adolescent Emma struggles with her complex feelings toward her mercurial, mysterious guardian. Swan Queen AU. Please read the warning inside.


_**Warning:** Emma is quite young in this fic - fourteen years old at the youngest; I would say sixteen at the absolute maximum. **Nothing** actually takes place between her and Regina, but Regina is an adult woman and, well, this is a fic about Emma's "sexual awakening," if that phrase isn't overused to the point of meaninglessness. Because of Emma's youth and the fact that she's been raised by Regina for part of her life, the content might be uncomfortable for some to read. Remember, you've been warned_.

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_Note: So... I broke a personal rule. Completely by accident, but I did it. I wrote something that might be a multi-chapter fic while I was still in the middle of another one. I don't know when I'm going to get to the next chapter of TLBR, but I really hope it's soon... This fic happened really suddenly and really quickly at like 11 PM, after a prompt from a friend to write a SQ character death fic. I... Decided to write an SQ version of The Lion King just to spite her (don't ask) and this is what popped out. This probably has echoes of other, similar fics, such as _Grooming_ by Dashed, but please remember that this came from an effort to rewrite a Disney movie about lions to be about fictional lesbians, not necessarily as an imitation of other fics. (I highly recommend that one, btw.) I'm not positive I'll be continuing this, but... Well... Lil' Emma is currently stuck in my head, so we'll see. Sorry for this ostentatiously long note. I hope you enjoy! P.S. I actually have no idea if deathcaps grow in the dark._

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It had been the mantra of Emma's life for years. The words spilled into the quiet spaces of her day-to-day life, filled the pauses at the head of each breath she took, just before she exhaled. It was always accompanied by a memory of hands flowing through her hair, Regina's hands, and the low murmur of Regina's voice, telling her. Reminding her.

"After what you did to your parents, it's no wonder nobody wanted you," Regina's voice would murmur in her head. "No one would take you in. No one wanted a killer. But I helped you, didn't I?" This was the part during the real thing where the hands in Emma's hair would grow a little harsher, tug on the cornsilk strands just hard enough to suggest future hurt. "Tell me, Emma."

Emma would reply by rote, the words so oft-repeated that they were nearly meaningless, "You saved me, Regina."

"I did," Regina would reply, and her voice was always a self-satisfied, throaty purr that skimmed shivers up Emma's spine. Emma was growing older and conscious, very conscious, of the way her body was starting to take the same shape as Regina's, how now that she was growing breasts and hips of her own, their bodies seemed to fit together like a key and a lock - because when Regina performed this ritual, as she did almost nightly, she would sit in the big chair in front of the enormous carved fireplace that had scared Emma whens he was younger, and Emma would sit in the chair with her, leaning against Regina, her head on Regina's chest so that her hair could be brushed and stroked and, in the end, pulled. Never hard enough to really pain her. But enough to threaten.

Emma was getting too big for the chair now. And her body was starting to fit Regina's. The peak of her growing was looming on the horizon and Emma had a vague, queasy feeling about it, that something bad might happen, something momentous and inexplicable. Something to do with Regina? She wasn't sure, because Regina seemed not to know of the way she made Emma's stomach lurch in half-fear, half-something else whenever she looked at her. Regina didn't look at her any differently than she had before - that same expression of mild indulgence, amusement, even, Emma thought, condescension, because what was Emma next to her? A child. A gawky girl with limbs too long for her body.

_A __killer__,_ said the constant whisper of those words in Emma's head. _No __one __wanted __a __killer__. __After __what __you __did __to __your __parents__..._

Emma didn't mean to, but she knew that that was meaningless itself. She had never wanted to hurt anyone, but she had. She understood dimly that her innate badness was why she rarely was allowed outside, and why her rooms were the deepest and darkest in Regina's palace, the ones that had no outside windows. The world beyond the palace had already been tainted by her, but it could be spared further corruption if she would grow up in darkness like a deathcap. If no one saw her, no one would pluck her; she would not poison anyone else.

It had occurred to her more than once that she wasn't sure how she'd killed her parents. She'd only been told, again and again, that it was her doing. She had lived with Regina since she was small and didn't remember her parents that clearly; Regina was her only source of information, the only person besides the servants who saw her.

It was only when she was old enough to overflow the armchair that she finally found the courage to ask.

"How did my parents die?" Emma asked. She immediately knew that she'd misjudged the moment. Regina's hands had been restless in her hair before, yes, but her expression had also been relatively smooth. Now Regina's hands went still and the frown in her voice made Emma want to flinch.

"How do you think?" Regina said cuttingly. "You know what you did, Emma."

No, Emma didn't, but she didn't say that. She waited to see if she'd be punished or sent away, but Regina pulled her closer instead, almost into her lap, the way Emma'd sat when she was much smaller, and a pressure on her head guided Emma to put her head on Regina's shoulder, manipulated like a puppet, Regina holding the strings.

Relief washed through Emma at first. She wasn't being sent away and she hadn't made Regina angry; the first she could have lived with comfortably, but not the second. Regina's anger was not a thing that died quickly. Emma's punishment could have lasted for days, if Regina chose. Staying in her windowless room, no library privileges, no time at the fireside with Regina stroking her and speaking to her. Regina was the only person who ever touched Emma, and she'd had to go without seeing her before - sometimes when she'd misbehaved, other times when the business of ruling a kingdom took Regina elsewhere. It was only in those droughts that Emma realized how badly she needed to be touched by Regina, who made her feel awful some of the time and flushed and strange all the rest of the time, but who could pet away all the thoughts that collected in Emma's head like dust during the day and leave Emma strangely comforted and wonderfully blank.

The relief of being allowed to stay fled after a moment. Emma's head was on Regina's shoulder, and her face was next to Regina's neck. Emma thought suddenly of three books she'd found in Regina's library once, and how she'd never gone back to look at them again, but they'd lingered in her head nevertheless as though in one reading of each she'd memorized the pages.

They had been half pictures, half writing. The pictures had been of naked people and the writing had been to go with each picture. Emma had wondered inanely, when she hadn't yet realized what she was looking at, which came first - had the writing been about the picture, or the picture drawn from the writing? Then she realized that the pictures were of men and women in the carnal act, and she'd closed the open book so quickly it had made a loud clap in the library's still quiet.

Hastily she'd looked around. Had anyone seen her? No: there was no one else in the library at this time of day; the servants dusted in the morning and swept up at night, but only Emma used the library. Even visiting dignitaries and the members of Regina's court didn't come in here. Regina herself, Emma supposed, came in here sometimes. After all, they were her books...

These books had to be Regina's too. Emma looked down at the closed book, then tentatively opened it again, as though the pictures were snakes that might strike at her. She looked more closely at the pictures and at the writing, which wasn't particularly eloquent, but which nonetheless made something pull behind her stomach. There were a lot of words like "turgid" and "slick," and also inexplicably odd mentions of roots and caves. Then she realized that those were just polite words for men and women's _parts__,_ and she'd almost lost her nerve and closed the book again.

She didn't close the book. She went to the next one on that shelf, which was similar, but with slightly different pictures, and the words were in a language she didn't know. The pictures were, she understood, somehow wilder or stranger than the first one - the poses of the men and women were more contorted, the setting of each picture more public. It was the third book that was the wildest and strangest, because all the pictures were of two women, not a woman and a man.

Emma had looked at that one the longest of all the books, her mouth incredibly dry, a steady ache between her thighs that she recognized from occasional nights of poor sleep and restless dreaming. The writing in that book was also in another language, the same one, she thought, as the second book, but the pictures were the most beautiful of all. Maybe because both the figures were women, and women had always seemed more beautiful than men to Emma, but that thought only came to her later, when she'd had time to distance herself from what she'd seen. In the moment, she was consumed by those images, mesmerized. One woman was dark-haired and the other light-haired. In one picture, the dark-haired woman had her head between the other's legs, hands gripping the light-haired woman's hips. Whatever the dark-haired woman was doing, the other woman liked it: her head was tossed back in frenzy, her lips parted as if crying out.

In the picture on the next page, the dark-haired woman was on her side, one leg hooked backwards over the hip of her partner. Very explicitly outlined were the folds between the dark-haired woman's legs, and three fingers of the light-haired woman's hand buried in that secret place. Fluid was trickling down her fingers, her palm, her wrist, it had gushed out of the dark-haired woman, whose eyes were shut, mouth open in a soundless expression of...

Emma realized suddenly that she was wet between her legs too, very wet; when she shifted on her feet, she could feel the slippery flesh. She closed the third book with hands that trembled and put it back in its place. She picked up the fourth book on the shelf, wondering blankly what she might find in this one. More nude women? But when she opened it, it was a treatise on morality, and the others in the row were all the same, dry and without pictures. Emma had never been much interested in reading; the library was where she did her studies and idled away the day, that was all.

She had thought of the books often after that day, of course, but never in Regina's presence, not until now. Emma's breath was being exhaled against the skin of Regina's neck, and from where she was, Emma could see Regina's chest rising and falling in the clinging velvet of her dress. Why had Regina owned that book? The first two Emma thought she understood, because she supposed a man and a woman might need a... A... Something to show them what to do. But the third book, of the two women... Did that mean that Regina...? An image suddenly rose to her mind, of Regina doing what was being done in one of those pictures. Her mouth pressed between the legs of another woman, those red lips that had shaped Emma's name so many times... And what woman had been kissed between her legs by Regina? That part of the picture was fuzzy and blank for Emma until her mind, horribly, awfully, supplied herself. Herself with Regina's kiss in the wetness at the join of her thighs.

Oh, gods. She _was_ wet. She realized it the way she had in the library, but it was terrible, not just surprising, to realize that she had her legs almost in Regina's lap, Regina's hands in her hair, and she was wet. Emma was wetter than she'd ever been. In her own bed, she would have pushed her hips into the mattress and pressed her face into the pillow until the need was gone and she could think clearly again, but Regina was _right __there__._

What if Regina could tell?

Regina could do magic, Emma knew. She had seen it, though she wasn't supposed to have. Years before, Emma had gotten sick at the beginning of winter, right when she and Regina were meant to go to the winter palace for the season. (Emma's only travel had been in a dark, rattling carriage, to and from Regina's different palaces as the seasons changed: where Regina went, she went. She was never allowed to look out the carriage window.) Emma's illness delayed the trip badly as she wavered in a hot, dreamlike fever. She had been thinly conscious of much of what went on around her in between her dozes, and once she'd woken and someone had been sitting at her bedside, a dark shape in leather and satin that wore Regina's familiar scent, which had always been apples, but that time had smelled like fermented fruit to Emma, whose nose wasn't working properly. Smelling it made her feel funny and intoxicated and even stranger than she'd felt all through the fever, and she tried to push away so that the scent wouldn't fill her nostrils so completely.

"Don't move," Regina's voice had come from above her, confirming that the spot of blackness in Emma's vision was who she'd suspected it to be. "You'll make yourself dizzy. Here, do you want -" then a little noise of displeasure: Regina had reached towards Emma's beside table for a cup of water that should have been there, then found none. Regina then conjured one in her hand in a plume of purple smoke that had the same fuzzy-edged quality of unreality as Regina herself did, which told Emma it had been real; that was the only time she saw Regina do magic, and she'd never brought it up, feeling that it wasn't a topic for her to ask questions about.

Emma didn't think an ordinary person would be able to know she was wet, but Regina, who had magic, might. Her heart began to pound in her chest. What if Regina could hear it? What if Regina could know, and could hear, and Emma had to get away. She had to get out. She scrambled up; her hands pushed against the chair, one slipped, bumped Regina's shoulder, but she was up, yes, on her feet, Regina's hands snaring in her hair briefly then slipping away.

"I have to go," Emma said, her voice sounding strange and distant to her own ears.

Regina frowned in confusion. Emma wasn't sure she'd ever seen Regina confused before, not like this - as though something inanimate had moved before her eyes, changing the order of things as she knew them.

"Emma?" Regina said, sitting up straight.

"I have to go," Emma repeated thinly. "Please, can - may I go? Let me go."

Regina's expression was even more unfamiliar now, stranger. Had she realized? Had she understood? Was that disgust on her face, horror? Emma felt herself go red with shame and fear. She didn't want to be here, looking at Regina's impenetrable eyes, her furrowed brow, seeing Regina feel something Emma couldn't recognize.

"Let me go," Emma said, but Regina wasn't protesting, hadn't lifted hand or voice to stop her. Emma turned, she ran. The door swung shut behind her, and Emma was in the darkness of the hall: she was safe from Regina, though she was not free.


End file.
